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From: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@openvz.org>
To: "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: RCU: non-atomic assignment to long/pointer variables in gcc
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:30:32 +0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <50F52FC8.4000701@openvz.org> (raw)

Documentation/atomic_ops.txt (182dd4b277177e8465ad11cd9f85f282946b5578)
says that pointers, longs, ints, and chars are stored and loaded atomically.

But GCC actually may split assignment to 'long' variable into two instructions.
see example in http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55981

GCC also splits assignments to 'volatile' variables and this is actually a bug in gcc.

volatile unsigned long y;

y = 0x100000001ul;

   400728:	c7 05 66 06 20 00 01 	movl   $0x1,0x200666(%rip)        # 600d98 <y>
   40072f:	00 00 00
   400732:	c7 05 60 06 20 00 01 	movl   $0x1,0x200660(%rip)        # 600d9c <y+0x4>
   400739:	00 00 00

fortunately for y = 0; it generates this:

   40071d:	48 c7 05 70 06 20 00 	movq   $0x0,0x200670(%rip)        # 600d98 <y>
   400724:	00 00 00 00

Thus NULL is safe, but constant ERR_PTR may be dangerous.

Probably rcu_assign_pointer() should use ACCESS_ONCE() around lvalue, because
splitting assignment for non-volatile variable seems like completely valid,
but this may help only after fixing that bug in GCC.

             reply	other threads:[~2013-01-15 10:30 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2013-01-15 10:30 Konstantin Khlebnikov [this message]
2013-01-15 12:32 ` RCU: non-atomic assignment to long/pointer variables in gcc Paul E. McKenney
2013-01-15 13:07   ` Konstantin Khlebnikov
2013-01-15 16:17     ` Paul E. McKenney

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